


Boy and the Ocean

by Amarantramentum



Series: The Economics of Death [3]
Category: League of Legends
Genre: Angst, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Corporal Punishment, Drabble, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 01:03:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12923994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amarantramentum/pseuds/Amarantramentum
Summary: It was an endless blue he could not help but yearn for.





	Boy and the Ocean

**Author's Note:**

> A small drabble about Talon before he was given the name Talon.

Boy had always called himself Boy.  He had no other name for himself. It was a name he held close to himself, even if it was just a word. The first time he had not been invisible. The first time an adult had acknowledged him. It was the kind of monumental memory one did not so easily forget, like the old man’s odd gift of a rock soon after, or the strange roughness in his voice, like the way the guards spoke to him, or when the shopkeepers spoke to stray cats for being hungry. He did not understand it, but cherished the rock and the name all the same.

It was a kindness none had extended to him thus far, and he was determined to make the most of it.

Boy held the rock close to him now as he ventured into the depths of Noxus’ sewers, still much too afraid of the darkness and all that it held to venture very far, his rock beside his heart like a constant reminder of the world above or the man’s kindness in naming him. It made traversing the smaller tunnels an awkward affair as he squeezed into pipes never designed for travel, somehow balancing himself as he kept his hand on his rock all the while. Yet he would not let go. It would feel much too like a match finally giving in to the overwhelming darkness of the sewers, or finally realising he was lost and alone and afraid.

* * *

 It was a relief when he came to the cistern below Noxus Prime, a collection of the city’s waste and undoubtedly a reminder of all that the children of the below were to others. He had seen it; felt it. The whip ached still across his back, a dull bite that refused to be forgotten, yet still he did not understand  _why_.

It hurt less than the way his stomach protested with every small movement he made, every groaning roar a reminder he had not eaten in more days than he had fingers. He would have swallowed it down were it not for the dryness in his throat, dull and scratchy and sapping both his strength and voice.

If he were to be honest, he wanted only to sleep, even here, in the dark filth of what was undoubtedly the remains of meals and illness and waste and chemicals and other unspeakable things. He wanted simply to rest his head upon his arm for a moment, rock by his side as always, and rest his eyes. Allow himself a moment to catch his breath.

The cistern was large and awning and dwarfed Boy in a way the buildings above ground did not. They did not feel as if they were a creature born of brick and mortar, swallowing Boy in a strange hunger that could not be sated. The stench did not seem so bad when it felt less like sewerage, and more like the sick in his stomach when he ate the butcher’s refuse or when the kind greengrocer offered him scraps at the end of the day with a smile and a chuckle.

He sometimes wondered what would happen if he jumped into its stomach. If he would be coughed up, or simply join the rest of the city’s refuse, beyond the walls and seeping into the ground where wild animals did not dare graze, even for berries that while tart, were more sustaining than the green grasses and leaves beyond.

* * *

 When he sat at the lip of an open drainage pipe to stare out at the land  _beyond_ , it was not to wonder such things. No, while he often dreamt of escaping into that endless green-and-blue outside, what he truly wanted to see was the blueness beyond even that. He had heard of an ocean beyond the treeline; something made of water upon water upon water. Even more than in the cistern. Even more than in the moat.

It filled him with a morbid curiosity.

“We will see the ocean one day,” he declared to himself, or the rock, or no one in particular. He liked to speak to himself in moments such as these, because no one else would, and the silence all too often felt as if it would smother him in its thick smoke. Because he did not speak with the roughness that was in the adults’ voices; was much softer and he latched onto it even if it was simply his own.

He yearned for such a softness always.

Boy did not know what laid beyond the ocean, or indeed if it ended. But he needed to see it, to drink of it and sate the thirst he never could be rid of. It would fill his belly, too! It was a pleasant thought and he clung to it like a stubborn burr or a child with little hope for much else.

It seemed the ocean would make life so much simpler; would fill him with all that he needed, and he looked forward to the day his – adults – returned to take him there. He had seen the other children with their adults; had seen them hold hands and smile and laugh and kiss and eat and hug and he did not doubt that he, too, had adults that loved him. Perhaps they simply had forgotten him, like that girl who dropped her teddy bear by the cross roads last week and returned the next day and laughed and cried when she held it to her like a lifeline.

He picked up his rock and turned to leave. He did not like to be away from his spot on the corner of the street just beyond an entrance to the sewers, minutes away from where he first remembered being Boy, lest his adults walk past and miss him.

“We’ll go to the sea and there will be plenty for us there. We’ll be happy there.”

It would be soon enough. He knew it.


End file.
